Making Time With PiSound

Weekends offer free time to work on fun projects. The problem is that I have so many interests. I tend to bounce around from one project to another. I

never really complete anything or learn a new skill deeply enough. This year I am really trying to change that by winnowing it down to the essential activities that bring me satisfaction. This usually means working on things that scratch an itch and exercise a different part of my brain.

Time has become even more compressed now that I have little baby crawling around. Of course caring for her is my priority. I spend a lot of time with

her. I feel grateful that I get the opportunity to spend so much quality time with her. It is the great joy of my life to watch her grow.

I always have this nagging urge to fill any free time being productive. At last I had some time to myself this weekend so I plunged into working on a

Raspberry Pi project. I have been staring at this little box feeling guilty for not utylising it. The Pi has a special hat called a PiSound[1]. This

board is made by a company called Blokas Labs. I highly recommend checking them out if you are interested in tinkering with a Raspberry Pi for music

projects. The board features a high-quality DAC, quarter-inch inputs and outputs, midi ports, volume and gain controls, and a programmable button. It's

a great piece of gear. I have it running atop a Raspberry Pi 3B+ I bought before pandemic scarcity became an issue.

Blokas Labs released an operating system called PatchBox. It is based on Raspian with some cool audio software bundled. My current OS was kind of

broken so I pulled the latest disk image from the Blokas Labs website. I had to switch to my dual-core laptop running Elementry OS because that is the

only machine I have with a SD card reader. I also had to install Etcher to burn the image to the SD card. It was pretty easy going. After the image was

burned to disk I put it in the Raspberry Pi and booted it up. The great thing about this tech stack is that most everything works out of the box and

you don't need mess with configuration too much. I loaded up a Pure Data patch and plugged the PiSound into a tube guitar amp. Voila! Sound!

I was having a blast exploring some patches that come pre-installed with PatchBox. I hooked up an old M-Audio Oxygen 8 midi keyboard to the USB input. What do you

know, the keyboard worked with the patch. This is very exciting to me. I loaded up a Pure Data patch called Euclidean. This is a complex, generative

patch with some interesting, random sounds. I enjoyed listening to variations playing while I did some chores around the house. Then my wheels started turning. What

if I hook up some guitar pedals to the PiSound and play with the settings? I hooked up a reverb and a delay pedal in line and twiddled the knobs to extreme settings. Manipulating this generative music into other-worldly feedback oscillation was great fun.

After playing with this setup for an hour I looked around and at the tangle of wires and music devices scattered about our dining room table. Our house is

small. There is no way I could keep this set up permanently. I would like to make it easy to play with the PiSound whenever I have a few minutes to

spare. The components of this music making setup are pretty tiny, so I cleared room on the top of a bookshelf adjacent to my work desk. I set the

PiSound, midi-keyboard, and a Roland Mini Amp on the shelf. Now, when I have some time to make music, I plug in and play music.

I hope to awaken my creative life by removing obstacles of productivity. This is the main lesson in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear[2]. In order to build a good habit, make it easy to practice it. Now that my set up is in place I will work to

really learn PureData and start recording some of these musical projects. I look forward to sharing these musical vignettes with you soon. Onward and upward.

=> https://blokas.io/pisound/

=> https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits